There was a time when oil was considered the
world’s most valuable resource. Today, data has emerged as the ‘new oil’
driving the digital economy. With constant changes in today’s business
environment, data workloads are evolving; and so are applications and their
storage requirements. Over time, SSDs have become the storage
technology-of-choice for application acceleration and access to real-time data.
Take for instance emerging technologies, such as autonomous driving, AI,
machine learning, edge applications, etc., which generate hundreds of terabytes
of data. With the technology landscape rapidly shifting, data infrastructure
has taken a quantum leap to help organizations meet data demands and support
new workloads.
Here
are five key trends boosting the Next Generation of NVMe SSDs in Data Centers
and the Cloud:
1.Workload Evolution
The
introduction of cloud storage and the proliferation of analytics, edge
devices and machine learning (ML) has led organizations to adapt their
infrastructure to new types of workloads. Above all, we are witnessing a huge
shift in the diversity of data being generated by enterprises as well as
consumers. Consider the exponential increase in video data – with content
providers streaming 694K hours of video in a single minute! It is no surprise
video on-demand, streaming and caching videos have become the entertainment
standard.
2.A Better Understanding Of The Role Of Data Infrastructure
Irrespective of cloud-first companies or
those in the midst of digital transformation, data center architects nowadays
come with a deeper knowledge of their applications and keen insights on the
demand for their infrastructure. Therefore, based on an application’s read and
write patterns, data center architects are deploying NVMe SSDs as primary
storage devices that can deliver optimum performance as well as low power and
high endurance for executing a particular task.
3.Advancements In 3D NAND Technology
A type of non-volatile storage
technology, NAND has revolutionized Internet of Things (IoT), mobile devices,
personal computing, wearables, videography and flash in the data center. The
advancements in NAND flash technology have led to more capacity and higher
density SSDs. This has ensured a high level of endurance, performance and
reliability, thereby opening new possibilities for optimized flash-based
devices.
4.NVMe™
Designed to maximise the benefit of
high-performance flash storage media, NVM
Express (NVMe) delivers blazing fast performance and low latency. This
technology has proved to be a game-changer for data centers and applications,
particularly for real-time analytics, machine-to-machine (M2M) workloads,
Internet of Things (IoT), and emerging technologies, which are based on NVMe
over Fabrics™.
Western Digital’s offering of two new
families of Ultrastar NVMe SSDs –
DC SN640 and DC SN340 – will set
a new bar for performance and power efficiency, laying the foundation for
next-generation purpose-built infrastructure. These drives are ideal for
extreme performance in mixed-workload applications, including SQL Server,
MySQL, virtual desktops and other business-critical workloads using
hyper-converged Infrastructures, such as VMware vSAN and Microsoft Azure Stack
HCI solutions.
5.The Move From General To Purpose-Built Solutions
Choosing the right data storage
foundation is crucial for optimizing solutions for delivering efficiencies in
the changing data landscape. Data center customers are fast realizing that the
current general-purpose architectures are inefficient and carry resource and
cost overhead. As the demand for data centers multiply, the concept of ‘one
size fits all’ doesn’t work. Thus, organisations need to focus on developing
purpose-built solutions and adopt architectures that go beyond the limited
resource ratios of general-purpose processing, memory, storage and
interconnect. Innovative technologies, such as 3D NAND, and various tiers of
flash enabled by NVMe as well as a wide range of form factors, will help
deliver enhanced capabilities that can meet the new demands of data.
The Next
Generation Data
Center
The
entire IT ecosystem is undergoing a sea of change – one that is enabling more
opportunities for data and is unlocking new revenue streams. Organizations are
transitioning to purpose-built solutions to improve performance, efficiency,
density and overall cost of ownership. The new generation of drives, such as
Ultrastar NVMe SSDs, are based on evolving workloads and trends within the data
center and NAND technology. With speeds of up to 3.1GiB/s and 1.4GiB/s
sequential read and write performance, these drives make ideal solutions for
data centers that are being built to accommodate new workloads, such as
autonomous driving, surveillance, voice recognition, edge computing and AI and
ML.